Spring arrives at the Saskatoon Forestry Farm Park & Zoo

MARK LOSHACK: Are there any new babies out there at the zoo?

JEFF MITCHELL: No new babies yet. At the zoo, we always know when it’s getting to be spring when we see our prairie dogs start popping up. Two or three weeks ago, we saw the first one, and that always makes us very excited.

The bears have started to get a little more active. They’re still in their den and still haven’t come outside, but we’ve seen them going back and forth between their two den areas. The zebras loved to be outside in this nicer weather.

The bears must be really hungry when they wake up?

MITCHELL: Obviously, they are. The bears lose anywhere between 60 and 80 kilograms over the winter. They haven’t eaten for five months or so. Their stomach gut fauna -the bacteria that helps break down food- really isn’t strong.

So for the first few weeks, all they get is greens, a lot of lettuce, maybe a few fruits and veggies, but mostly just lettuce, to really get that bacteria growing back and get back.

What they would do in the wild when they first would get up is they would nibble on grass and some greens and really wouldn’t be going after that meat and that strong stuff until later on in the season, when their bacteria have grown back into their stomach.

We actually have 14 or 15 different diets that the bears go on through the course of the year that we change depending on what time of the year it is to help them get back into the right gut fauna.

Then they massively put on weight, and then kind of cut off at the end, when they start to go to sleep.

There’s a lot of science behind what we do. I don’t think a lot of people realize some of the stuff that we could do out here, but that’s some of the stuff that makes it really exciting for us

Tell me about the monarch butterflies. Do they migrate?

MITCHELL: Most people think a monarch flies from here to Mexico and back, and generally, that’s not the way it happens.

As they migrate north, there are many generations that get up here, and then they do start migrating back south, but there are many generations to get back down south.

There’s one big area in Mexico that they go to, and I believe last year, the monarchs are one of the species that’s actually increased. In 2023 or 2022, there were about 2.2 acres full of monarchs.

Last year, there were over 4.4 acres of monarchs. So, monarchs are one of the species that are doing better because they can handle a wide variety of climates.